A world-class technology company with an international footprint, and a broad product and service offering across a number of sectors, including National Defence and Security agencies to space and transport.
The group ‘innovates to protect’, and aims to make the world a safer place with their high-tech sensors, information, countermeasures and energetics solutions. Their core focus is on engineering excellence, with its 60-year heritage and deep knowledge in sensors, communications, cyber and AI provides technology, engineering and advisory services to Government and high-value engineering companies.
As well as being part of a larger Group, they have a separate stand-alone brand. This is very important in the context of talent attraction and Employee Value Proposition. This business is very much a people business, in that, at its core, it is the expertise of its people that the business is built on. It is also a complex, highly regulated business, with many of the client projects being bound to stringent confidentiality requirements. This creates some challenges when trying to attract the top talent to the organisation.
Purpose of the project
Jarred Consulting’s involvement was twofold:
1) To review the approach to Early Talent assessment, including required competencies and design a process which was fit for purpose, and which would support the business’ growth aspirations
2) To design and delivery a graduate development programme to support early talent throughout their first two years at the firm.
How Jarred Consulting helped
We worked closely with the Early Talent team to sharpen up on their competency framework and expectations of their junior level employees. This involved stakeholder consultation, benchmarking and ensuring that we understood and tapped into their culture and language. Thereafter we designed new and adapted existing assessment materials to align with the newly agreed expectations. We also briefed internal assessors on the new process.
The development programme was designed to allow them to regularly assess each individual’s progress, application of learning and impact of the learning on behaviours and performance. The aim was to be able to better track and pick up/feedback on any issues as they arise.
It was designed to ensure line managers are connected at each stage of the programme as they will had a pivotal role to play in holding follow up conversations with their graduate/apprentice about each ‘sprint’ and agree opportunities for the learning to be applied further in their ‘day job’.
Regular (monthly) check-ins between line managers and graduates/apprentices are the aim at the firm, so this served as a further way to reinforce the expectation of these cohorts: that they will be held accountable for their learning and behaviours.
The programme was structured as three ‘sprints’ covering areas such as self awareness, influencing, communication, commercial awareness and Business 101. Their values were also weaved throughout the programme.
The following year we designed a number of additional learning modules to support the graduate’s development, and facilitated action learning sets to help embed and reflect upon the learning.
The Jarred team have worked with us for a couple of years, helping us to review our graduate development offering, and then designing a new graduate development programme which enabled our graduates to step into their new roles with confidence. The programme consisted of a series of ‘sprints’ (short bursts of blended learning, action learning sets and supporting resources) which could then be applied to the graduates’ day jobs. There was close liaison with the graduates line managers to ensure that they understood the programme and were able to support appropriately. The Jarred team are excellent partners, their expertise in the learning space, second to none, and their flexible, iterative style really suited our complex business. They took time to get to know our business, our drivers and culture. They elegantly bridged conversations with senior stakeholders and graduates alike. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.
Global Engineering Firm